The Mystical West
- Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ ONE episode summary
The Mystical West, an enormous area that stretches from Stonehenge
in Wiltshire to the furthest tips of Cornwall and Wales, is David Dimbleby's
destination for this week's episode of A Picture of Britain.
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In his quest to celebrate the British landscape that has inspired
artists for the past 300 years, this week David Dimbleby encounters
the work of Dylan Thomas, Constable, JMW Turner and many more.
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A land of pre-historic ruins, ley lines and crop circles, of druids
and bards, King Arthur and Merlin, this area has come to epitomise all
that is ancient and magical in Britain. Artists have been drawn here,
not in search of pleasant pastures and pretty hamlets, but to immerse
themselves in wild landscape and thrilling myth.
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David journeys to Stonehenge, where John Constable
and JMW Turner, those giants of British landscape painting,
chose to pit their strengths against one another in a Titanic clash
for mastery.
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In Dorset, he goes in search of Thomas Hardy's Egdon
Heath: the expanse of wild landscape where so many of Hardy's characters
meet their fate, and which later provided the title for one of Gustav
Holst's most famous pieces of music.
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Travelling north to Snowdonia, David discovers the work of Richard
Wilson - one of the founding fathers of British landscape painting.
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Returning south, David reveals how Dylan Thomas' love
for the countryside around his native Swansea saved this poet from the
pubs of London - if only temporarily.
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After sailing across the Bristol Channel, David ventures into the savage
landscapes and legends of Devon and Cornwall that inspired a unique
genre of literature: the chilling West Country Gothic of Arthur
Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles and Daphne
du Maurier's Rebecca.
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Finally, in St Ives, he sees the legacy of the famous artistic community
that settled here in the Thirties, seeking to rediscover an innocence
and purity of artistic vision in the unique and dramatic light of Cornwall.
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